WEEKEND VIDZ: LIVING SACRIFICE, RETALIATORY MEASURES, AND DOOMSDAY PROPHECY

Yesterday I saw three music videos from three bands I like, and I thought they’d make a good combined piece of entertainment for this Sunday. The music all qualifies as extreme, and no, there’s no clean singing in any of them, but there’s still a good variety of styles represented. We’ll start with a recently revealed video of Living Sacrifice performing at the Cornerstone 2008 festival. Then we’ll move to the first official video of a Finnish band called Retaliatory Measures whose most recent EP we reviewed just last week. Last but not least, we’ve got another brand new video, this one from a band we discovered in one of our MISCELLANY expeditions, Doomsday Prophecy.

LIVING SACRIFICE

I became a big fan of this band after seeing them on the 2008 tour that that marked their revival after an extended hiatus. It was one of those sets that gets burned into your memory — a performance by musicians whose maturity showed in the skill and self-assurance of their playing but whose energy level would leave lots of much younger bands in the dust. Yesterday I saw a post on their Facebook page about a video they’d never seen before of a show they did that same year — 2008 — at a festival in Illinois.

The visual quality of the footage is rough — which suits this song — but the sound quality is pretty strong. The whole package shows just how fucking heavy this band is and how much power they generate on stage. It’s a blowtorch performance of  a blowtorch song — coming up right after the jump.

RETALIATORY MEASURES

We just reviewed the most recent EP of this band four days ago. By coincidence, we found out that only yesterday Retaliatory Measures released their first official video, for a song from the EP called “Judgement”. It’s a montage of footage from their tour of Norway. And what happened to these guys on tour?

Well, there was drinking, the playing of pranks, drinking, the torquing of lug-nuts on bus tires, drinking, driving through ice tunnels, drinking, bingo, drinking, sleeping, and drinking. And with all that drinking, there was peeing and vomiting. Apparently, these guys drink.

It also appears that they managed to squeeze in some live playing of music in Norway, though I’m guessing that was really just an excuse to drive around on a bus and . . . drink. As you know from our review of their EP, MMX, we think the song they use as a soundtrack to all this . . . drinking . . . is fuckin’ great (which is true of all the songs on the EP). Grab yourself a drink and watch this new video:

Retaliatory Measures – Judgement (NoWay! tour 2011) from Tshernofilms on Vimeo.

DOOMSDAY PROPHECY

Doomsday Prophecy is a New Jersey band I picked randomly from our MISCELLANY list for a first listen back in February (and wrote about the experience here). I listened to two songs from the band’s demo album, one of which was called “Long Lost Friend”. Near the end of last week, the band let me know that they had just uploaded a music video for that same song.

I still really like the song, in part because of the interesting variation in the melody and guitar tone that unexpectedly occurs in the middle. It’s a passionate song to begin with, and the video enhances the emotional feeling of the music. It’s tough to tell a coherent story in the space of a single song, but this video pulls off that trick. It begins with a man (played by the band’s vocalist) writing a note, though you don’t realize what the note is until the very end of the video — which then ends in an uncertain way. Good stuff. Check it out: